Plotting, planning and movies.

September 11-12

I spent Thursday working on the rough draft of my first travel essay. It’s about my weekend spent with the Red Carpet Tour group back in August, and proved more difficult to write than I originally thought – because I wanted to write so much more than I was allowed! But that’s reassuring, because I’m going to have to expand it a lot when it comes to my capstone this winter.

Jamie stopped by Thursday evening to start planning/booking things for our trip to Taupo and Rotorua. Good thing, too, since we were leaving in less than a week. Haha. We just ended up booking bus tickets and hostels, and figured we’d play the rest of the trip by ear (what does that expression mean anyway? Can I play something by elbow? Clavicle? Pinkie toe?)

Friday I finished up my draft, and had fun working on a i-Map (basically a flow chart of your brainstorming) using InDesign. I haven’t played around with it (or any other layout program for that matter) for a long time, so it was fun to try and re-figure everything out.

Jamie and I had planned to go to a party at the Marine house Friday night (much like we’d planned this same time last month), but it doesn’t seem like it’s in the cards for us (wow, I’m just full of bad clichés tonight!). Jamie is now staying with a different family up in Brooklyn. Karen and Greg both work for the NZ Embassy, and they were having the American Ambassador over for dinner that night, and of course Jamie was invited, too. We figured by the time dinner was over, we’d have to catch cabs all over town in order to go hang out with inebriated American military guys. … Somehow that just wasn’t very appealing to me.

Instead, I went to another movie night hosted by Jayne and Ash. Not too many people showed up this time – just me, Jen, Denise, Una, Melinda and Josh. Ash tried to start in on an anti-Lord of the Rings speech, and we just all laughed: he was clearly preaching to the wrong audience.

We ended up watching “The Illusionist,” followed by “Boondock Saints.” A pretty good movie night, I must say. Plus, this time, it came with lots of free pizza! Yum.

We stuck around after the movies to chat with Jayne and Ash a bit. Ash is a strange fellow. American expatriate who thinks the government is tracking his e-mails and who won’t vote in the November election because he doesn’t want “them” to find out where he is. He also has a lot of piercings and an obsession with zombies. Haha. Somehow I think he and Dave would get along well.

Ash talked to us for a long time – because once he gets going, he doesn’t stop for a long time – about various things ranging from his movie tastes to government e-mail scans to zombies to his theory on how tornadoes target trailer parks. And no, I’m not kidding about that last part – he seems quite convinced of it. He also regaled us with stories of pranks he used to play in his youth (and his not-so-youth). I think my favorite was about his Halloween last year: he dressed up like a zombie (complete with fake blood and white contacts), and lumbered around the streets of Wellington all day scaring people. It’s both hilarious and freaky to think about. He plans to do it again this year and has invited us all to join him. Part of me is intrigued just to go to watch him. At the very least, it would make a good blog entry.